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A Special Day at Hilton

Had you completely thrown the ISU/Nebraska game out of the equation on Saturday it still would have been a wild and fun day to be a Cyclone at Hilton. When you factor in the fact that ISU set a record in futility in the first half only to come back and drop 49 on the Huskers in the second half to come from behind, it was one of those days that you couldn’t help but smile constantly for the rest of the day after leaving Hilton.

In celebrating our Cyclone Basketball Centennial, there was an alumni game with many former ISU stars participating. While for much of the game it lacked the intensity of an actual game, what a tremendous opportunity to see all these past players all in one place! Fans that went were even treated to some 3 point gunning by Julo Michalik and a buzzer beating tip in by Fred “The Mayor” Hoiberg. Anybody that missed the game can watch the replay free at http://www.cyclones.com/ViewArticle.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=10700&ATCLID=1390637 courtesy of the Cyclone Clone Zone.

At halftime of the game, the All-Century team was honored and many of the past coaches had video messages for the game, including Tim Floyd, Larry Eustachy, and Wayne Morgan. I for one thought it was a classy act by Mr. Pollard to contact Morgan for his input into the celebration and a classy move by Morgan to provide it. I can’t imagine our past A.D. (who shall remain nameless) including the players and coaches from the Eustachy era at all in this celebration, let alone honoring them, had he still been in charge.

After the game was over, many of the fans remained in their seats to honor the players from the past as they were introduced. There were 175 former players, coaches, and trainers that came out onto the court to celebrate 100 years of Cyclone basketball. In addition to a ton of my favorites, some of the guys that I was pleased to see back were Curtis Stinson and Randy Brown. Stinson is still trying to advance his professional basketball career, and after the ire he has been shown by some fans I was impressed that he made it back in mid-season and wish him the best. It couldn’t have been easy for Coach Brown to come back either after the way his tenure ended, and from talking to him several times he is a good man that has paid for what he did and turned his life around so it was nice to see him receive some cheers as he was introduced as well.

Now on to the game! In the first half, a lid appeared on the Cyclones’ hoop that made scoring impossible. Despite the efforts of dozens of maintenance workers, the lid stayed put. When combined with some poor offense, this resulted in ISU setting a record in futility for a half of scoring as they trailed 11-24 at the half. The good news was that they played enough defense to keep it relatively close, and they came out like a ball of fire in the second half with a 19-3 run to take a 30-27 lead. By this point, the crowd was fired up and ready to get behind the team, and we would never look back on the way to a 60-52 victory. Luckily enough for the Huskers, maintenance was able to remove the lid at the under 8:00 timeout in the second half so they could score enough to make it respectable.

Rahshon Clark had a big double-double for the Cyclones and seemed to grab every rebound whether it was in his area or not. Jiri Hubalek played outstanding on Aleks Maric to hold him to 11 points in 34 minutes, and Bryan Peterson made 2 three-pointers and had a huge 3 point play late in drawing Maric’s fourth foul. The real star of the game for ISU though was Sean Haluska. He has struggled earlier this year and had been coming around before putting up 12 points on several difficult shots in 22 minutes. When the Cyclones needed a boost, Haluska was the man who provided it.

As I mentioned last week, this was a game that we absolutely had to have. That is not to say that winning it makes our season, but losing it would have been really hard to recover from. We now sit at 14-12 and 4-7 in the Big 12 with 5 games remaining. All 5 of these games we could easily lose, but one could make the argument that we could win any of the 5 as well since the toughest two are at home (against Kansas and Kansas State). It would be nice to get 2-3 more wins here before the Big 12 tournament to give ourselves a decent shot at some kind of post-season play.

-Tuesday I will talk about something that has been bugging me at a few home basketball games this season (and no, it is NOT the students!).

“I’m just glad I have Homan as my bodyguard,” Eustachy joked. “If I ever make it real big and get to drive a limo everyday, he’ll be driving it. I thought he came off the bench like somebody was stealing his cow or something.”

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